A new three-year contract with Rumpke was approved by the trustees Dec. 6, and Trustee Chairperson Laurie Peters Gilmore said the change will save the township about $42,888 annually.

Residents will see changes beginning Dec. 28, when Rumpke will start to distribute new red recycle bins.

“Kimble will be picking up the [yellow] recycle bins on the last day of their pickup … which will be Dec. 29,” said administrative assistant Debbie Bluso-Rogers. “Rumpke will be passing out new bins on Dec. 28 and 29.”

She said residents should put out their yellow recycling bins as usual, and Kimble will take them. Those bins will be replaced by Rumpke’s new red bins.

According to Bluso-Rogers, Rumpke sent a letter to residents “explaining their day of pickup.”

“We’re no longer going to have one day for the entire community; there’s going to be a schedule, and there’s going to be five days,” she stated.

Bluso-Rogers said residents should receive that letter by Dec. 28. Residents who did not receive a letter are advised to go to the township’s website at www.richfield-twp.org for additional information.

“I will be putting that on our website, per street, when they are going to be picked up. That will be on our website under the waste and recycle,” she said. “I know it’s confusing — we’re starting it the first of the year and already we have a holiday that week, so everybody that’s going to get picked up is delayed a day.”

Bluso-Rogers said the village will have “five or so” extra red recycle bins on hand.

“If we need more, they’ll drop more off, but we’ll start with five,” she stated.

In other business:

• Gilmore said the township “has only been called out once for salting for ice.”

“We’re ahead of the game financially because we haven’t had any plowing or any other use of salt consistently,” she stated. “We’ve probably saved anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000 so far.”

One concern caused by the lack of snow, said Summit County Chief Deputy Engineer Lawrence Fulton, is there is no storage space for any additional salt.

“Hopefully, we’ll be able to use some of it,” he said. “We have a minimum allocation we have to purchase for this next year, and I don’t know where we’re going to put it. It’s a good thing, but it’s not a good thing.”

• Bluso-Rogers read a letter from the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) stating an emergency repair on state Route 303 is scheduled to begin in the spring.

According to the letter, state Route 303 at Interstate 77 will be closed for five days.

Fulton said he interpreted the road repair as “some berm and maybe some curb work or maybe some lane expansion.”

“I would think they would keep one lane open for regular traffic,” Bluso-Rogers. “You know, for the people that live here.”

According to Fulton, the township likely will receive more information from ODOT before the project begins.

“They’ll probably have a preconstruction meeting,” he said. “We’ll follow up on that.”

• During the Dec. 6 meeting, Bluso-Rogers said, the trustees approved $6,200 for the purchase of three workstations and a fiscal officer laptop.

“It came in actually at $5,772.39,” she noted. “They’ve all been inventoried and assigned.”

With the new computers installed, the trustees voted unanimously to declare two desktop computers and one fiscal laptop as surplus.

“They’ll be all cleaned off. That’s part of the computer guy’s services,” Bluso-Rogers said. “He’s going to wipe off the hard drive so we can discard them.”

She said some of the surplus computers’ parts would be kept “as a spare” on the trustees’ desk.

• Gilmore said the trustees have received a request for “scanners for the snow plow trucks and the regular trucks at the service department.”

“These were only to scan and not to talk,” she said.

Wyatt said the scanners were not necessary because they are “not interactive.”

“I don’t think there’s a need,” he stated. “If they can’t communicate with them, it doesn’t do a thing. If they’re needed, we have dispatch and we have cell phones — each driver has that — so at this time, I think it’s unnecessary.”

All three trustees agreed the purchase was unnecessary.

The trustees will have an organizational meeting Jan. 3 at 10 a.m. at the township offices, located behind the fire station on West Streetsboro Road.